Chapter 14
One second I’m standing in front of Julian with my hand on his chest, and the next I’m against the edge of the great scrubbed table with his mouth on mine, and there is the speed I keep telling myself I’ve stopped noticing.
Except now I know exactly what it is, and it is aimed entirely at getting closer to me, and I am never going to stop noticing it again.
His hands come up to cradle my face, cool and careful despite everything he just said, and I make a sound against his mouth that tells him precisely how done I am with careful.
He pulls me closer. I get my hands under the soft grey sweater and the cool silk shirt and flatten them against his skin. He makes a sound I have never heard before, and it does something catastrophic to my remaining judgment.
“The bed,” he says against my lips. “The very good one. I refuse to do this on Marguerite’s table.”
“That may be the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I can do better.”
“Then do better upstairs.”
He picks me up. He simply lifts me off the floor like I weigh nothing, and I get half a laugh out and then his mouth is at the side of my throat, not biting, just there, cool and open and unbearably gentle over the pulse I now know he can hear, and whatever clever thing I was going to say goes out of my head.
I don’t remember much about the stairs. I remember the dark hall going past. I remember paintings he never takes down. I remember thinking that somewhere in this house there are rooms Julian stopped entering because everyone who once filled them disappeared.
His bedroom is at the north end of the second floor, and it is very much lived in. There are books on the bedside table, and a sweater over the back of a chair. One window is cracked open to the sea, and the curtains move in the cold air and the bed is, in fact, a very good one.
He sets me on it and stands over me for a moment, and I realize he’s giving me one last exit.
This is the man who waits at my door every single night until I’m safely inside.
The man who came to dinner because I asked him.
The man who has spent weeks wanting me and has never once made his wanting my problem.
I reach up and take a fistful of that soft grey sweater and pull.
“Julian,” I say. “I made a place at the table. Sit down.”
Whatever’s left of the restraint goes. He comes down over me, cool and heavy and reverent, his hands moving over the deep green sweater I chose at six in the morning like a liar.
He undresses me the way he does everything, each unhurried movement completed before the next one starts.
It takes an unreasonable amount of time because he keeps stopping to ask for permission.
“May I?” he asks as he unbuttons my sweater.
“Yes.”
His fingers find the button on my jeans.
“May I—”
“Julian, I’m having a card printed.”
He stills.
“What?”
“Something tasteful. Cream card stock. Penelope Harrington hereby grants Julian Volkov blanket permission to stop asking whether he may touch every individual square inch of her body.”
“I would keep it.”
“I know you would.”
He removes my jeans, then kisses my shoulder. Then the inside of my elbow, of all places, and I stop being funny. His teeth graze the place he just kissed, and he pulls back long enough to say, “I would like to do this many more times.”
He pauses at my bra.
“This is entirely impractical.”
“It’s a balcony bra. It’s supposed to be impractical.” And no, we’re not talking about why I chose it this morning.
He studies it with a scientist’s interest, then fumbles a little as he unfastens it, which I find oddly reassuring.
And then his mouth is on me and a muffled noise escapes his lips and he isn’t fumbling at all.
He takes his time with my breasts, pressing cool, open-mouthed kisses to them.
The night he touched me, he had one hand in my underwear.
I thought that was going to be the part that destroyed me. I had no idea.
He slides one cool hand between my legs, still over my underwear, and stops once, to look up at me.
“May I?”
“I will pay you.”
A quick flash of a smile and then his fingers find the place I want them immediately.
I am so wet that I can hear it, and he makes another of those sounds, and the whole idea of being embarrassed is beyond me.
I put my hands into his hair and push against his hand, and he strokes me slowly, and I come apart under him for what feels like the first time in my life.
Afterwards, I am breathing too hard to speak and he is watching me in a way I do not have the brainpower to analyze.
“You’re very good at that,” I manage finally, which makes him smile again.
“I’ve had time to practice.” He leans down and kisses me, soft and deep, his hand still between my legs. “And I have a great deal of time to improve.”
I reach for him, and he lets me, because I’ve learned he would never refuse me if I asked. I get his sweater off, and then the shirt underneath, which is black and silk. Then I am kissing my way across a chest I have already seen and yet somehow am not prepared for.
He is cool all over. Not cold like something dead, but cool like clean sheets in winter or stone in the shade.
His skin doesn’t become warm simply because he wants me.
It warms exactly where I touch him and nowhere else, an inch around every point of contact, and when I move my hand the coolness comes softly back over the place I’ve left.
So I keep touching him.
He makes a low sound when my mouth finds the base of his throat, and I do it again because I can. I trail my hand down over his smooth cool stomach, and when I get to the waistband of his pants he catches my wrist.
“Not like this.”
I look up, and flash him a smile.
“Not like that,” I agree. “Like this.”
I kiss my way down his body, and he doesn’t stop me this time. His hands go to my hair, not to pull me away but just to hold on, and I understand that I have given a man who has been alone for centuries something he doesn’t know how to ask for, and I want to give it to him for hours.
I get his pants undone and pull them down, and he’s wearing black silk boxers because of course he is.
I pull them down too and lose the ability to speak.
Again. He’s long and thick and better than I could have imagined, and when I wrap my hand around him, he’s cool beneath my fingers.
I look up at him, and the look on his face is more naked than I’ve ever seen it.
“Please,” he says.
I give him my mouth.
His hips lift, just once. I take him deeper, and I can feel him fighting not to move and not to thrust, not to do anything that might make me stop. His hands are still in my hair, but now they’re shaking.
“Penny,” he whispers, and then he makes that sound I’m starting to think of as mine, and he comes in my mouth with a single hard shudder.
I taste him. He’s cool and salty and he doesn’t breathe through it the way a man should.
There is a brief, dizzying moment where I am fully aware that I have my mouth on a man who does not breathe, does not have a heartbeat, and who has lived through centuries I cannot imagine.
I am the first person in God knows how long to have had him like this. And I’m still not afraid.
I slide up his body while he is still coming back to himself, and his hands come with me, as if he has forgotten he is allowed to let go.
I kiss him once, just to do it, and his eyes open.
They’re still that dark brown, but the red tint is more obvious now.
He looks up at me as if I’m something he has never seen before.
Then he blinks, slowly, and the smile that moves over his face is like the sun coming up.
“Penny,” he says again, but this time it’s a completely different word.
He destroys my underwear with one quick rip, then rolls us over so I’m on my back and he’s braced above me, and his hand slides between my legs again. He hasn’t lost an ounce of coordination. His fingers slip inside me easily, and I’m still wet and open and embarrassingly noisy about it.
“I had intended to be more restrained,” he murmurs.
“Please don’t.”
He smiles against my throat. “I wanted to take my time with you. For so many reasons. But I find now that I am having difficulty.”
I put my hand around the back of his neck.
“Fuck me, Julian.”
His head jerks up. “You’re sure?”
“Completely. I trust you.”
I don’t think I have ever seen his eyes this dark. He leans down and kisses me again, a long, deep kiss that feels like he’s taking the words out of my mouth. Then he lines himself up and pushes into me. All the way. And I cry out.
He immediately goes still, and I realize the sound was not entirely pleasure. He starts to move away and I clamp my legs around his hips.
“Don’t.”
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m not. I swear. Just give me a moment.”
I shift under him, finding space, and something inside me relaxes. When he moves again, it’s perfect. I’ve never felt anything like it. Cool and solid and filling me so completely that I can’t think.
“God,” he says, and it’s a prayer. “Penny, I can’t—”
“Then don’t.”
He looks down at me and begins to move, and I don’t want him to ever stop moving. He’s strong and he’s deep and he is entirely focused on me, on every small noise I make and every time I arch against him, and I’m so close again, so fast, that I’m almost frightened of it.
I clutch his shoulders and tighten around him, and his eyes close as if in pain. Then he pulls almost all the way out and does it again, and the whole world narrows to the rhythm of him moving in me and the places where our bodies meet.
It is perfect and it’s not enough. I pull his mouth down to mine and kiss him until his thrusts grow harder and deeper, and he puts his hand on my hip to pull me closer, and he is saying my name over and over against my mouth, and this time when I fall apart, he falls with me.
We lie still for a long time. Eventually I open my eyes to find his face inches from mine, and his eyes are back to the usual deep brown.
“Hi.”
“Hello,” he says gravely.
“I can’t move.”
“Then I suggest we stay here for the foreseeable future.”
I laugh weakly. He is still inside me, and I have no intention of moving. I run my hand over his back, just feeling the muscles, and he makes a low, contented sound.
“That feels very good.”
“I haven’t even started.”
He shifts, very slightly, under my hand.
“I’m not sure I’ll survive it.”
I kiss his jaw.
“You’re four hundred years old. You can survive anything.”
“You are the first thing in four hundred years, I have not been able to be reasonable about.”
He kisses me, and this time there is none of the fierce edge to it. Just the two of us in the quiet room. I want to stay here until the sun comes up and I don’t care that he can’t face it directly. I would rather have the dark and the sea and the feeling of his body next to mine.
But after a while he stirs, and I make a disappointed noise.
“I have to move,” he says.
“But you don’t want to.”
“Very much not.”
He shifts and eases out of me, and I regret it immediately. He does too, from the sound he makes. Then he stands, and I get the first real look at him in the light, naked and beautiful and mine, and my breath goes for entirely different reasons.
“Where are you going?”
“To get you a robe. You’re cold.”
He walks across the room, and I take my time watching him go.
I had plans for this part, and now that he’s here and there’s nothing but the two of us, I can’t remember what they were.
I just know I want to know everything. All the time he’s had.
Every story he’s ever stopped himself from telling because he thought it would be the end of something.
Because I am done with being good, and I am never going to let him be lonely again.
He comes back with a black silk robe that looks like it belongs in a magazine, and he wraps it around my shoulders before he sits back down on the edge of the bed.
“So,” I say.
He raises an eyebrow.
“You’re a vampire.”
“I am.”
“Four hundred years old.”
“Approximately.”
“Did you know Vlad the Impaler?”
Julian gives me a look.
“Not personally.”
I smile.
“Where are you from?”
He thinks for a second.
“There was a village. It no longer exists. It was very small and mostly poor and extremely far from anywhere.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head.
“It was a long time ago. I was born in winter, and they were certain I wouldn’t survive. I did.”
I run my hand down his arm.
“You told me you’d lost people. Was your family—”
“No,” he says quickly. “No, my parents lived, but they were very angry about what I had become. The Volkovs went to church. They did not become vampires. I left the country, and I never saw them again.”
“Oh.”
“It was a different time.”
He says it without emotion, which is how I know how much it matters.
“When did you come to America?”
“Originally in the early 1700s, but I left several times. I came back the last time in nineteen twenty-seven.”
“What brought you back?”
“Prohibition,” he says, and this time his mouth curves. “The best place to be a vampire is somewhere everyone is drinking in secret.”
I laugh.
“So you’ve been in Black Harbor since?”
“No. I moved around, but I like small towns.” He glances at me. “It’s easier to know what matters in a small place.”
I think of the man at the edge of the room at every party in this town, watching and remembering. The man who knew the legend about the widow’s lantern was wrong and who stood waist deep in sea water to save Theo’s dock.
“I like the way you pay attention.”
“Penny.”
“Is that weird?”
“No. It’s why I’m here.”
I stare at him.
“I have been very good at keeping my own company for a very long time. It’s a skill. I’ve practiced it. I have been content.” He touches my cheek with the back of his hand. “But I am not content with you. I don’t want to go back to that room alone.”
My throat closes, and I slide my arms around him, because I can, because he’s here.
“I’ve been making a place for you since October.”
“Have you?”
I nod against his shoulder.
“I thought it was so you wouldn’t have to be alone. I thought I was doing you a favor.”
He runs a hand down my back. “You didn’t owe me anything.”
“I know. I just wanted you. In my kitchen. In my life. So I kept inviting you.”
“And I kept accepting.” He presses his mouth to my hair. “I will keep accepting. For as long as you ask.”
“Good,” I say, and hold him tighter. “Because I’m going to ask a lot.”
I feel him smile.
“I’m counting on it.”